The internet regulator Icann has approved plans to let web addresses be written in non-Latin characters – such as Mandarin, Arabic, Hindu or Russian Cyrillic script – that it says represents the "biggest change" to how it works since its invention 40 years ago.

The proposal would mean that domain names – such as theguardian.com – could be written in the other languages and be understood natively by the machines that connect computers together over the web.

The first such Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs) could be up and running by the middle of next year, said Rod Beckstrom, the president of Icann, which oversees the development of such technologies online.

"Of the 1.6 billion users today worldwide, more than half use languages that have scripts that are not Latin-based," Beckstrom said at the opening of Icann's conference in Seoul, South Korea, this week. The conference approved the change today, its last day, following more than nine years of work and two years of testing.

The Icann vote means there is now a universal internet address code that will work in any language and everywhere. That is needed because the computers that translate the address into a string of digits carrying the destination computer's "internet address" have previously only functioned with Latin letters. The new scheme will translate those addresses no matter what the script used for the address is.

That could mean an explosion in the number of people who can use the internet directly with keyboards developed in their own languages, rather than struggling with unfamiliar Roman letters as used in the west.

Thus a Korean user will be able to write a web address that is almost entirely in Chinese script, rather than a few characters in Mandarin with the suffix ".kr". Presently, only the domain name can be in non-Latin script; the suffix, such as .com or .org, must be in Latin script.

"It's more incremental [than previous changes] but it's the single biggest change in 10 or 15 years," Beckstrom said. "It's about making the internet more global and more accessible. One world, one internet."

Icann will launch a fast-track process for approving the scheme on 16 November. That should mean the first fully IDN-compliant addresses being in operation by mid-2010.

The most likely first users are Chinese, Arabic and Russian operators.

However, bringing IDNs to email could take longer, Icann said.

One thing that will not be going away from web addresses, though: the "http://" prefix – which the inventor of the web, Tim Berners-Lee said earlier this month he wishes he had not made mandatory in web addresses: "Look at all the paper and trees that could have been saved if people had not had to write or type out those slashes on paper over the years — not to mention the human labor and time spent typing those two keystrokes countless millions of times in browser address boxes."